One of the first things I do when conducting an SEO site review is to check a sites major keywords VS its top ten competing sites in Google.
Two recurring problems I find are a lack of keyword rich links from unique domains or way too many keyword stuffed links being built. Both of these situations can wreak havoc on your search engine rankings.
People spend a lot of time picking out the keywords they want to rank higher on Google. However, they usually assign arbitrary goals for how many links they need to acquire for each keyword.
This is a huge mistake but one you can easily avoid or correct. There are many free tools that can get you the information you need I recommend http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/ but there are plenty of others out there.
Both tools are free although you need a paid account to get all of the data from Open Site Explorer but the free data is available instantly and easily exportable to excel.
Simple Steps
1. Make lists of the top 10 Google results for your major keywords.
2. Run one or both tools on your own site as well as your competition. Make sure you filter out internal links. (Open Site Explorer even has a way to filter out no followed links which is nice)
3. Once you have your list, filter out duplicate urls. Google is not going to count 500 links from the same site. So the best way to do this is to act like site wide links are all just one link for our purposes.
4. Sort your anchor text by unique occurrences and be sure to count things like “SEO” and “seo” as the same word. (Do not worry about capitalization)
You should now have everything you need to compare your anchor text density to your competition. This is great information because these sites are already doing well for the keywords you are targeting. The perfect anchor text density is whatever Google is already showing you it likes.
This will eliminate you simply guessing how many links you need for each keyword. However, there are a few things to watch for. Sometimes you will see people ranking with very few keyword rich links. So they may have a super low density and still rank. In these cases just build up links slowly but don’t worry if your density is 6% and there’s is .02% etc.
Sometimes nobody in a niche is actively building keyword rich links and you can reap the rewards. You just don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb and have your anchor text density be 45% while everyone else is in the 3 to 10% range. The key is to have a natural looking anchor text keyword profile.
All links are not created equal so if you are in a situation where you cant have too high of an anchor text density to be successful make sure you use POWERFUL links for that keyword because you won’t be building as many.
Do not worry about having a high density for your company name or url. That is actually pretty normal and can help bring your other anchor text densities down to a natural looking range.
Use your discretion because each niche will have wildly different acceptable percentages but whatever you do, stop guessing when it comes to anchor text density and develop a customized strategy.
Bonus
The list you just put together is linking to your competition. Why are they not linking to you? Simply run their results VS your domain’s backlinks and now you have a highly relevant list of sites to target for link building.
As I was catching up on news in the social media sphere today, I got wind of the whole Chris Brogan Kmart Promotion controversy. IMHO, its just silly. Who begrudges someone for being totally transparent, following all the dictates they talk about and exploring new ways of advertising? Read more
